Published in the research literature as Attending to Emotions.
How much attention do you pay to your own feelings?
How often you stop and take stock of what you're feeling.
Attending to Emotions is about how much attention goes to a person's own feelings. Whether they stop and take stock, or get on with the day and find out later.
Everybody has feelings running. The question is how much of the attention they get: whether a bad mood gets examined or simply endured, and whether somebody could name what they are feeling if asked in the moment.
It is the scale most likely to be mistaken for a virtue, and the framing is worth being careful about. Reflection is genuinely useful and it is not free. Time spent working out what a feeling is about is time, and there are weeks where getting on with it is the better answer.
It also has very little to do with how strongly anybody feels. Somebody can be deeply moved by things and rarely turn round to look at that, and somebody else can feel mildly and examine it closely.
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Start your free assessmentEvery one of the seven runs between two named ends, and neither end is the one to aim for. Each buys something and each costs something, which is why both of them have a name here.
Attention goes outward, to the thing that needs doing. Somebody at this end notices a mood mainly by its effects, and would usually rather fix the situation than sit and work out what it did to them. What it buys is momentum, and a genuine resistance to being derailed. What it costs is that a feeling nobody looked at does not leave; it waits, and it usually surfaces somewhere it does not belong.
Attention turns inward as a matter of habit. Somebody at this end notices the shift in their own mood while it is happening, and often knows what caused it. What it buys is that very little goes unexamined, and that they can usually say what is wrong. What it costs is that examining a feeling and being stuck in it look identical from inside, and the second one is easy to reach.
The middle usually means it depends on the size of the thing. Ordinary irritation goes unexamined and a real upset gets attention, which is a reasonable allocation and is how a lot of people run without ever deciding to.
A result names one of five positions along this scale. They run from one end to the other, and no figure sits beside them: there is no reference sample for these scales, so nothing here can say how many people land where.
The common misreading is that this measures emotional health, or self-awareness in a general sense. It measures a habit of attention and nothing else. The action end is not avoidance, and the reflective end is not insight; either can be either, and the questions here cannot tell them apart.
Both are about somebody's own feelings and their own head. Attending to Emotions is about noticing a feeling; Emotion-Based Decision-Making is about whether it gets a vote once it has been noticed.
Both concern what happens to a feeling. Attending to Emotions is about whether the person notices it; Negative Expressivity is about whether anybody else does.
A scale describes a tendency, not an ability. There is no good end of any of the seven, and where somebody sits says nothing about how well they handle what they feel.
It also says nothing about where they stand next to anybody. No reference sample exists for these scales, so a result describes how one person answered and stops there.
Or start with what emotional intelligence means.
Sixty-eight questions, about eight minutes. You get a plain read on all seven scales, free, with both ends of every one of them named rather than scored.
68 questions · about 8 min · free
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